The National Council of Persons with Disabilities (NCPD) yesterday unveiled new appellations for people with disabilities (PWD) based on categories of disabilities. The new designations will replace references to PLWDs that are considered derogatory. “Those names somehow trivialise them. For instance, if you call someone Ikimuga (a disabled person), this is a form of dehumanising. We thus want to avoid references that make PWD feel frustrated and less human,” said Emmanuel Ndayisaba, the Executive Secretary for NCPD during a news conference yesterday. “For instance, people had made it a routine to consider people with vision impairment as useless and everything has to be done for them. This has always led to depriving them of their rights such as the right to education and right to play, among others. We want to eradicate such a mindset since it is evident that people with disabilities can also do able bodied people can do,” he said The new appellations will replace the old connotations such as ‘disabled person’. ‘People with vision impairment’ will replace ‘the blind’, a person with speech and hearing impairments will also be used instead of the word ‘deaf’. The other people are those with mental disabilities, hump disease as well as those with skin disabilities. Dwarfs will be referred to as people with extra-ordinary shortness.
